What I Saw 10/22/16: Arrow & Supergirl

Hello again! This post is way late because I have been doing a bunch of traveling on very little sleep. When I had time to relax on Saturday last week I spent a lot of it just binge watching an anime, and a couple episodes of regular TV. Each episode of the anime, Planetes, covers a theme which blogging all at once would not do justice, so I will little by little write about it at some point. In the meantime, I'll write about the comic shows I'm trying to catch up. I wanted to give Supergirl another chance now that it switched networks. I have another day's worth if TV to blog about, and I'll try to get it out soon. 

What I Watched:

Arrow S5.E2 - "Recruits"
Supergirl S2.E1 - "The Adventures of Supergirl"

What I saw:

The Arrow is back.

After two lackluster seasons, it seems like Arrow is on track to make a comeback. The theme of the episode was about teamwork and trusting others. Better yet, that theme was played out in both the present day and flashback scenes, with drastically different outcomes.

Oliver learns that the paranoia that he has learned over the years is actually preventing him from being able to hang on to his new recruits. He took a chance in trusting Ragman in saving him rather than take vengeance. Using that small victory, he decides to reveal his identity to show that he trusts them, rather than try to beat it into them like it was to him.

The flashback scene explains where he learned the exercise of having the recruits try to get past him to ring a bell. It also explains why he finds it so hard to trust others and build friendships. Once he came up with the idea to team up and he rang the bell, the Bratva killed all the other recruits leaving him to be the sole survivor. I'd be scared to make friends after all that too.

The show is doing a good job of keeping a balance on use of magic, metahumans, and general badassery. The biggest flaws of the last two seasons was that they lacked any focus on what type of villain or how big should they make the stakes. Sometimes just a personal struggle can be interesting on its own, like Felicity's guilt over the Havenrock nuke, or Captain Lance's returning alcoholism. I'm interested to see how those storylines will play out.

Supergirl is kind of the same.

The first half of Supergirl kind of played out the same as the first season. It still seemed to reach out as to why an all powerful being goody two shoes is relevant in today's modern storytelling of flawed heroes. It did get over its fear of whether it could include Superman and still be a show about Supergirl, and they even made fun of how much of a need he is compared to her. 

The last half picked up a little, as the characters riffed off of each other making it more enjoyable to watch. It still suffers from cheesy dialogue, but the writers seem to be more aware of it and make it part of the joke rather than expect us to take it seriously. It has potential, but I still need a few more episodes to really see if it has found it's own rhythm.

Superhero shows have sort of dominated my attention, especially since the CW is planning a badasss crossover through all 4 shows. I would say I'll be back into some of the other shows I was watching, but National Novel Writing Month is starting on November and I'll be putting my focus on writing 50,000 words during the month. The posts won't be as frequent as they once were, but I'll try post at least once a week. Wish me luck!